Power Outage Left BART Trains in Rail Yard

​City-bound commuters left cooling their heels this morning along BART's Richmond line can thank the Bay Area's favorite company for their delays: PG&E.

A PG&E power outage in Berkeley led to a series of mishaps, culminating in trains being stuck in BART's Richmond maintenance yard, unable to leave the station.

BART spokesman Jim Allison said the unexplained 6:12 a.m. outage disabled some of the rail switches at the Berkeley station -- and, just as would happen at your home, affected BART computers. When the computers were reset, it "created a further problem at the Richmond yard." The switches at the maintenance yard could not be automatically shifted, and the trains were frozen in their tracks.

BART solved this problem using brawn: Workers physically moved the switches, and the trains were on their way.

After an hour of delays, BART has been back on schedule since 7:15 a.m.

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